


Never Laid Eyes On You

by Havepenwillimagine (starchan007)



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, One Shot, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 18:30:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17412020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starchan007/pseuds/Havepenwillimagine
Summary: Illya Kuryakin and Napoleon solo often find themselves wishing they’d never met. Until they don’t.





	Never Laid Eyes On You

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! This is not only my first fic in the Man From U.N.C.L.E fandom, but also the first fic I’ve posted in a few years, so I hope you enjoy it!

It’s that smirk, that little curve of his mouth in an army photograph that should’ve been austere, that does it. Illya is sitting in a chair in a dark room, listening to Oleg tell him about the man in the photograph - they’ve already moved to another one, where small black boxes obscure the picture’s other occupants. But they’re unnecessary, Illya thinks. Solo would be easy to pick out anyways, with his sharp features and broad smile - when he feels it. Solo’s face, even when staring back at him from a mug shot is… 

Illya cannot acknowledge the word, not fully. But it draws him in, pulls at a thing he’d long thought dead, a thing that he’d purposefully, carefully _deliberately_ killed. A thing that cannot exist, not in someone like him; trained to kill at the snap of a finger and without so much as a questioning glance. He hates the feeling of it stirring inside him and he thinks it would have been better if he’d never laid eyes on Napoleon Solo in the first place.

—————————

They’re sitting alone in a cafe in some park somewhere. All of the ‘patrons’ who had been occupying the other seats only moments ago had abruptly stood and departed along with Napoleon and Kuryakin’s respective superiors. That’s when the Red Peril starts on him, and Napoleon feels it then. He feels it in the smug expression on the Russian’s undeniably handsome face as he rattles off Napoleon’s own history, poking and prodding and twisting at things he knows _nothing_ about. He feels it in the memory of blue eyes meeting his from across a razor-wire-topped fence, in the way hard, unyielding arms had wrapped around him and subdued him so easily just a short while ago. So he does what he does best and he pushes right back. 

He goes for the jugular; Kuryakin’s father being banished in shame to Siberia at the tender age of ten, his episodes which had so nearly prevented him from having a life worth anything at all, his mother and her popularity amongst men her husband had called friends. He doesn’t relent until the Russian bear is on his feet, the table overturned before them and Kuryakin is taking deep, furious breaths through his nostrils. _Good_ , Napoleon thinks. Perhaps he will regret meeting Napoleon Solo as much as he already regrets meeting Illya Kuryakin.

—————————

Illya isn’t wrong. He usually isn’t, but every once in a while being right carries a heftier sting. He realizes once again the mistake that is Napoleon Solo when he finds himself standing in a hotel room with a listening device to his ear as he hears the telltale sounds of Solo ‘convincing’ Victoria Vinciguerra upstairs. 

“Well, doesn’t seem like he needs _your_ help,” Gaby says. 

There’s a teasing note in her voice and Illya turns away sharply so she can’t see the look on his face. Stupid, stupid Illya, thinking that Solo’s preening when Illya could not help but be impressed with his thieving skills - right until they’d failed him - or the way they had worked so well together, filling in the minor gaps of the other’s skill set, or the way Napoleon had stood behind him, gently patting his back as he gagged the rest of the water from his lungs once they had found dry land again, meant anything. Concerned partner had been an act, a performance, one to rival even the one Napoleon Solo was putting on under those sheets upstairs. It was foolish to have thought otherwise. He wishes he’d never seen that face staring at him from a black and white photo.

———————————

Napoleon realizes it in the helicopter, sitting across from Illya and listening to Sanders on the radio. _”Kill the Russian, if necessary.”_. He feels his mouth go dry. He had always known, of course, that this was probably going to be part of the plan. But that had been, well, before. Before he’d noticed that Illya had changed from that silly bow-tie at a mere teasing word. Before ‘Cowboy’ had started rolling off the man’s tongue as something closer to an endearment than insult. Before Illya had rescued him from that god-awful chair, and his blue eyes had lit up and sparked and sizzled with anger as fierce as the electricity that coursed through Rudi’s body when he realized what had been done to Napoleon. Before Illya had reached out with a hand that was trembling to wipe the trickle of blood from Napoleon’s nostril with a look on his face that Napoleon, skilled as he was with people, had no hope of reading.

And long, _long_ before Illya had become his Red Peril.

Now, as he glances up and meets Illya’s eyes and sees his own expression mirrored back at him, he realizes that perhaps he really would have been better off if he’d never even heard of Illya Kuryakin. 

———————————

The last time Illya thinks it, thinks it and _really_ means it is something of a blur. He remembers Oleg, asking why he’s being told that the American has the tape, and not much else. When he comes down the room is a mess, shattered glass and wood everywhere. Illya doesn’t care. His heart is still hammering in his chest, he can hear the blood rushing in his ears. Everything around him seems to have a strange red tint. He picks up his weapon, doesn’t even look down at it as he methodically chambers a round. 

Solo. 

Napoleon. 

_Cowboy_.

The pain, the fury, the he feels now is nothing compared to what he felt when Gaby, his innocent little chop-shop girl, betrayed them at what he now knows was Waverly’s behest. It’s nothing to how he feels when he finds Napoleon, his decadent, American Cowboy, strapped to that damned chair or when Alexander Vinciguerra hit the American over the head with a tire-iron in that rainy, mud-covered field and gave Illya the strength to literally throw a motorcycle at him. No, this is worse, because it’s so strong it feels almost like _nothing_. For a moment, for one hopelessly brief moment, he had thought… but it doesn’t matter, and his world is better off without Napoleon Solo in it. Illya holds his hand up in front of him until it stops shaking, and then he knocks on the door.

———————————-

It hits Napoleon Solo harder than ever as he’s standing on a balcony in the bright Italian sunlight. The computer tape crackles merrily in it’s ashtray-turned-bonfire-pit on the table behind them. He sips quietly at his drink and thinks about the look on Illya’s face when he’d tossed him the watch. He’d thought about doing otherwise. His gun had been right there, loaded and ready, and he knew something was off, even if he didn’t know what. Perhaps Illya simply took his role as Red Peril more seriously than Napoleon had thought. But then Napoleon’s eyes had fallen on the tape - stupidly left out in the open for anyone to see - and he realized. Illya knew. Illya knew and he was… Napoleon was a fool. He made his choice then. 

“I almost forgot, I got you something.” 

He tossed the watch and saw Illya’s hand dart from inside his jacket as though he hadn’t been about to pull out a pistol of his own. He had caught it and when he had realized what it was his eyes light up. It’s that look that Napoleon can’t stop thinking about now. He wants to say something, wants to address whatever it was in Illya’s eyes that he had been allowed to glimpse so briefly. But he thinks that would require a vulnerability of his own that he’s not sure he’s ready to give. He almost snorts. Listen to him, talking about ‘ready’, as if it’s something that would ever be more than a fleeting openness in a pair of blue eyes. He wants to take back the first time they locked eyes as he sat in the back of a struggling black car in the streets of East Berlin, if only because he thinks it might spare him a bit of pain. 

——————————-

It’s months later, long after dealing with Waverly’s ‘unpleasantness’ in Istanbul that Illya thinks of it again. He’s woken by a ray of sunlight spilling through the crack in the curtains that falls directly across his eyes. His first instinct is to feel along the sheets beside him and he cracks his eyes open when he finds them empty and cool to the touch. He isn’t worried though; he knows he’s in an U.N.C.L.E safe house and while he wasn’t expecting to wake up alone he knows if anything was wrong he’d have already known about it. 

He sits up and looks around the room; there are two sets of clothes heaped messily on the floor at the foot of the bed and an open suitcase sitting on the chair in the corner. Illya hears the sound of running water coming from the kitchen and realizes he can smell coffee and something else cooking. He smiles to himself as he sits up and reaches for his watch on the nightstand. He pulls his own clothes from the suitcase and dresses before going into the kitchen. Napoleon stands at the stove cooking what Illya now sees is an omelette. He’s already dressed but his tie hangs untied around his neck and his curls are still endearingly unruly without the usual product he uses. 

“Good morning, Cowboy,” Illya murmurs. 

Napoleon turns and smiles at him and there’s joy in that look, and it pulls at something in Illya, something he’d once thought dead. He can feel it curling lazily, contentedly, inside him and he smiles back, thinking how fortunate he was when he first laid eyes on Napoleon Solo.

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t remember what got me back into this, but I started reading ficus and then rewatched the movie and just fell in love with these two all over again. I feel robbed that we didn’t get a sequel. Oh well... thanks for stopping by and I hope you liked it!


End file.
